Residents of Brisbane, Australia must have woke up Thursday morning with at least some sense of relief. The swollen Brisbane River that runs through the nation’s third largest city did not reach the catastrophic levels as they were predicted to overnight. With at least 25 dead and a dozen still missing, Australia did not face an easy …

New Yorkers like myself awoke this morning to a fluffy layer of fresh snow. (And the sound of scores of plows sweeping the streets clean, as our billionaire mayor tries to make us forget about the Blizzard of 2009.) New Englanders are being walloped with a full-on major snowstorm—though hardened Bostonians just shrug it off—while the …

One of the surprising facts about the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which struck the island country a year ago today, is that by seismic standards it wasn’t all that big. The temblor was 7.0 on the Richter scale—strong, but hardly record-breaking. The earthquake that hit Chile a month and a half later was an 8.8—some 500 times …

Even before the earthquake a year ago that killed at least 220,000 people, Haiti was an ecological nightmare. Large-scale deforestation has left less than 2% of the original forest cover standing—a fact that is starkly apparent when flying between Haiti and its neighboring country the Dominican Republic, which has conserved far …

It won’t surprise readers of this blog that I agree with the BP Oil Spill Commission that there are serious safety problems with offshore drilling that need to be tackled to prevent another Deepwater Horizon. But the oil industry doesn’t quite see it that way. From the American Petroleum Institute’s (API) response to the commission’s …

The National Commission of the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling released its final report this morning. (I know—you were watching the Verizon iPhone launch.) We’ll have a story up soon on the mainpage about the report and the impact it may have on the offshore drilling industry—I’m guessing not that much—I …

It’s another miserable day for flood-stricken Queensland, with parts of Brisbane being evacuated after the city’s river burst its banks on Tuesday afternoon. Local reports say the Brisbane roads that haven’t been closed due to flooding are choked with fleeing residents.

One of the biggest obstacles to reducing carbon emissions is the simple fact that political time and climatological time are very, very different. Politicians in elected democracies think on two- or four-year cycles—if that—while even the leaders of an autocratic state like China, without the pressures of an election, are still …

Over on the TIME.com mainpage, I have a piece about the growing number of scientific studies that have examined the Gulf of Mexico since oil spill, and found a surprising fact. Most of the oil and other hydrocarbons released by the blown Macondo well seem to have vanished, broken down and digested by bacteria. It’s a sign that the Gulf, …